Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France by Kate van Orden (review)

REVIEWS 276 Suffering,” focuses on how different emotional components are inherent in poetic production and changed over time. The seventh essay, “A Philologist’s Remarks on Memoria,” deals with memory, a very broad and important motif of artistic and literary production. Particular attention is given to poetry considered as a vessel for remembering the history of human feeling, experiences, and expectations. The book ends with an essay by the editor Samuel P. Jaffe that illustrates Ohly’s system of thought and his humanum philological method of investigation. The essays contained in the book are very rich with references and cross-references, but are sometimes difficult to follow. The volume, however , is valuable resource for scholars of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. ROSSELLA PESCATORI, Italian, UCLA Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2005) xiv + 322 pp., 30 color plates, 18 musical examples. Music has always been thought to possess moral and civilizing powers, but could music instill conciliatory or civilizing attitudes after a period of strife and civil war? That is the central question of Kate van Orden’s Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France, which addresses the period approximately during and after the French Wars of Religion (1562–1629). Van Orden’s book is situated within the tradition of Norbert Elias, who in The Civilizing Process contends that the emphasis on manners and civilité in early modern Europe helped keep people in check and control unnecessary violence, thus promoting social control by way of the monarchy. Although van Orden asserts that the social and self-disciplining roles of music go back to the Neoplatonic academies of the Renaissance, she argues that music played a central role in this period of great cultural and social transformations. Consequently, her “object is to situate music in the broad process of behavioral and cultural disciplining that the French aristocracy underwent in the late sixteenth century” (7). She is concerned with the transition which turned French gens d’armes into gentilshommes, at a time when the military profession was inseparably linked to the nobility and their education, and the impact this evolution had on French state-building. According to van Orden, music, dance, and the discipline required to excel in these arts were the missing links in this transformation. Music was a main subject of study in noble military academies. Nobles learned music and dancing, alongside fencing and other martial arts. Dance, however, did not only contribute to the humanizing of society. For example, the pyrrhic dance (which was a virtuosic armed dance) was very useful for infantry training because it allowed troops to be mobilized with greater speed and cohesion. However, it appears “as though civility first took hold through musical means” (8). The essential discipline of drill and dance was internalized into self-restraint, hence contributing to the “civilizing process.” The discipline required of sixteenth and early seventeenth-century dancers was very much like that considered necessary for soldiers. In addition, dance became an increasingly important determinant of political success and had great social ramifications : “By the end of the seventeenth century, gentlemen could destroy a career at court with missteps in balls” (99 n. 60). Discipline, both for purposes of war and the civilizing process, is therefore one of van Orden’s key words, as she REVIEWS 277 contends that the discipline required to “mobilize large numbers of men in a coordinated fashion” was more important to the Military Revolution than the advent of gunpowder warfare (197). In an age of increasing civility, the nobility’s valor and bellicose nature had to be channeled in new directions; hence the creation or revival of such spectacles (some of which went back to ancient Greco-Roman traditions) as the ballet de cour, the pyrrhic dance, and the ballet à cheval, where aggressiveness was internalized and kept within the bounds of “civilized” behavior. These artistic “compromises,” or what van Orden refers to as “the containment of great violence within a musical order,” allowed the French nobility to keep their militaristic heritage alive and put it on display, yet adapt it to a new culture where it was no longer fashionable to...